The first time I heard about Artemisia Gentileschi was in high school, art history lesson. The painter was assigned me for a thematic analysis, and since that time I appreciated her works of art that I was also able to look at in a couple of occasions (during my visit to the Uffizi museum and in an art exhibition in Milan).

I was very happy to read – for the YA group GdL – a novel centered on her figure. The novel in the end turned out to be a good historical reconstruction and extremely likeable from the narrative point of view.

The novel begins with one of the most dramatic moment of the painter’s life, the trial where Agostino Tassi was accused to have raped her. We have so a hint of the women condition during that time (1600): most of the people against her, Artemisia compared to a whore, the inquisition methods to evaluate if a woman told the truth and a general hostility of judges and lawyers.

Susan Vreeland describes Artemisia point of view and her story: the trial in Rome, the years in Florence and the Accademia, her marriage and the maternity, the years in Genoa, Venice and Naples and her relation with her father and other acquaintances (Galileo Galilei among them).

Autoritratto come allegoria della Pittura (from Wikipedia)

The author is able to describe the painter side of Artemisia: when she is looking around she sees shades, lights and shadows, she has a technical approach, her imagination is always projected to the composition and she ultimately he act of painting is what is most important to her. Concerning the human side the novel describes a woman who finds difficult to trust other people – she was betrayed also by her father various times, but the overall impression is a lack of depth of this side of her personality (the opposite risk was to digress too much from reality towards fiction).

Artemisia story mirrors her artistic production and the novel points out very well this correlation and also provides a key to read some elements in her paintings (the choices of colors and textures,…).

The novel lacks something to be actually engaging, but it’s very fluid and helps to shed light on a figure sometimes neglected in the history of art (I’m talking about high school courses, I do not know about the university ones)